#3, I used to make an argument that once a research area was “fully subscribed” it made no sense to demand higher funding. You can’t rush cheaper solar, or better batteries, once the area has interest. This bites against those (your book?) who look at innovations per capita. An active field may have a natural rate. Though also, a neglected field may have unsuspected treasures.

The arnold bread problem reminded me of a paper I ready in b-school on the proliferation of varieties in the cereal market and I think this is it. I don’t have access to jstor acticles, but for those that do, here is the link:

“Are you morally obligated to do X?” vs
“Is Jim morally obligated to do X?”

It seems to me that the Jim question may be fairly read as referring to Jim’s moral code. I don’t know Jim, so I’m less likely to guess that he is morally obligated to do something than I am, ’cause I know my own moral code.

If this wasn’t addressed, it addresses the alleged weak intuitions of both lay and philosopher.

#1 Kubrik was a genius, too bad he is gone.
2001 Space Odyssey was one of the reasons I took film courses in college. It’s still my favorite Kubrik film visual-wise.
The first part of Full Metal Jacket is my other favorite, but that may be more due to R Lee Emery tour de force performance.

This comment from the “A Clockwork Orange” interview is priceless, and makes me miss Kubrick terribly:

Interviewer: Contrary to Rousseau, do you believe that man is born bad and that society makes him worse?

Kubrick: I wouldn’t put it like that. I think that when Rousseau transferred the concept of original sin from man to society, he was responsible for a lot of misguided social thinking which followed. I don’t think that man is what he is because of an imperfectly structured society, but rather that society is imperfectly structured because of the nature of man. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

#3. It would have been much easier for me to find a job in mathematics (my PhD was minted in 1996) if I hadn’t had east bloc and chinese mathematicians to compete with. That being said, I didn’t like my odds and found work in a different field after a short time.

I’m going to take a wild guess that there aren’t really forty varieties of Arnold bread, its more forty varieties of packaging around a handful of varieties, produced with small variations.

In a parallel universe the same company gets the same amount of supermarket shelf space for its two or three varieties of bread. Maybe people complain about the quasi-monopoly, but no one thinks the solution is for the same company to make forty varieties of bread, which would be obviously ridiculous.

As to why the forty different types of packaging, maybe due to internal politics the company doesn’t like to discontinue brands and it doesn’t cost them that much to make the slight variations. And there is no reason for customers to flock overwhelming to one of the varieties and abandon the others, since they are all pretty much the same.

#3: Should we discount this find because it so closely adheres to the ideological agenda of Borjas’ other work? Should we presume that he dug deeper for this result than would somebody who wanted to emphasize a growing pie instead of total substitution? In general, should we trust work more when it is consisent with an author’s previous findings or inconsistent?